Constructed for one of his customers, the shield accepts any 2-wire 10k thermistor sensors, outputting the readings to a small LCD screen. The screen is supported by some code put together by his associate [crenn], but you are not limited to solely displaying the temperatures there. Since this module piggybacks on top of the ChipKIT the same fashion as any standard shield, you clearly have the ability to use and manipulate the data at will. With 12 ports on board this would work well for a house-wide temperature monitoring system, or perhaps in a complex brewing setup.

Both the temperature shield and LCD boards have been released under the Open Source Hardware License, so you can easily build your own if you have the means, though [Will] has a few extras he’s willing to sell if you need one quickly.

[Nathan] got his hands on a chipKIT Uno32 development board and wrote a Pong sketch that you can play with a VGA monitor. We love the hardware that makes this feel very much like the classic. It uses a collection of resistor-based digital to analog converters to generate the color signals for the VGA protocol. The score for each player is show on a 7-segment display instead of being printed on-screen. And the paddles are made up of a pair of potentiometers.

For those interested in the game physics themselves, [Nathan] provided a nice explanation about ball movement at the bottom of his post. If you need even more details, dive into the code package that he links to.

In our hands-on review of the Digilent chipKIT Uno32, we posed the question of what the lasting appeal might be for a 32-bit Arduino work-alike. We felt it needed some novel applications exploiting its special features…not just the same old Arduino sketches with MOAR BITS. After the fractal demo, we’ve hit upon something unique and fun…

Following Maker Faire, we’ve had a few days to poke around with Digilent’s 32-bit Arduino-compatible chipKIT boards and compiler. We have some initial performance figures to report, along with impressions of the hardware and software.